I Curse the River of Time

Arvid Jansen's world is spinning out of control. It's 1989, and communism is crumbling, along with the Berlin Wall, his marriage, and his mother's health. She's dying of cancer and feels the need to return to her family home in Denmark. Arvid follows her, and as she deals with her illness, he examines his own life choices, coming to grips with the transient nature of life. Narrator Jefferson Mays allows only a hint of Arvid's self-pity to come though, instead opting for the matter-of-fact stoicism of Petterson's clean, spare prose. With intelligent dialogue and descriptions, Petterson (OUT STEALING HORSES) succeeds in creating stark images of the unforgiving Scandinavian landscape as well as evoking the terrible, terrifying silence in the infinite spaces between human beings. This novel is a prequel to Petterson's 2000 work, IN THE WAKE. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from June 14, 2010
Like an emotional sucker punch, the latest novel from the much-acclaimed Petterson (a prequel to 2006's In the Wake) examines lives half-lived, ending, and perhaps beginning anew. In 1989, 37-year-old Arvid Jansen's marriage is ending and his mother is dying of cancer. Hoping to leave his marital woes behind in Oslo, Jansen follows his Danish-born mother to her home country, to the beach house where the family spent summers. During the ferry ride and the following days in Denmark, Jansen recalls his childhood bond with his mother and his decision, after two years of college, to leave school and join his fellow Communists in the factories. He struggles with his commitment to communism—the title is a line from a poem by Mao—and with his place in his family and in the larger world. Thankfully, there is neither overt sentimentalism nor a deathbed declaration of love between mother and son, but Petterson blends enough hope with the gorgeously evoked melancholy to come up with a heartbreaking and cautiously optimistic work.